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‘No, please let me finish what I have to say. This is hard enough as it is.’ She raised her gaze and looked deep into his troubled, shadowed blue eyes. ‘Alex, you remember the shepherd’s hut on the border?’
‘Yes, of course. How could I forget it?’ There was a small vertical frown line between his brows. Obviously, whatever else he had been expecting her to talk about, it was not this.
‘You were very ill, delirious.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you recall when you woke? When the fever had broken, the morning when the French troops left?’
‘Very clearly! I hope I never again have to live through another moment like the one when you told me you had been trapped like that.’
Hebe knew she was about to plunge him into even greater anxiety, but doggedly she talked on. It felt as though the words were being strangled in her throat.
‘When you woke, you were suddenly embarrassed because you had been dreaming, and you could remember your dream very clearly.’
That did bring the colour back into his face, and she could tell it was an effort for him to keep his eyes steady on her. All he said was, ‘Yes, I recall.’
‘That was not a dream,’ Hebe said quietly. ‘That was the recollection of what had happened while you were delirious.’
‘What?’ The word came out as a whisper. Hebe dropped her gaze from his appalled expression.
‘You remembered having…making love to me, did you not?’
‘Yes. But Hebe…surely not? Surely it was as you said, a dream? You joked about it.’
‘Do you think I wanted to discuss it?’
He reached out for her hands and Hebe, knowing if he touched her she would fall into his arms, recoiled sharply back into the chair. He was Clarissa?
?s, he must never suspect how she felt about him, never be allowed to throw away the true direction of his life for this.
‘My God!’ Alex flung himself out of the chair and took two jerky strides away from her to stand, one hand resting on the wing of his chair, his back turned to her. ‘It happened that night? While the French were there?’
‘Yes. That was why I could do nothing. I could not struggle, I could not cry out and try to rouse you, or they would have found us.’
There was a long silence, then he said, ‘So you had to lie there, while I… Hebe, how could you bear it?’
‘Better you than fifteen Frenchmen,’ Hebe said, without realising the effect her words would have.
Alex spun round, his face white and sick. ‘Yes, as you say, better to be raped by one man than fifteen.’
‘It was not rape,’ she tried to say. ‘You did not know…’ But he was not listening to her.
‘I must have hurt you.’ She stared into her lap. ‘Hebe?’ Reluctantly she nodded.
‘And the next morning you get up and you wash and you dress, and you look after the weak, useless, sick man who has just ravished you, and you walk over that damn mountain to nothing but strangers and more danger and you never let me suspect a thing. I said I thought you had courage Hebe, I never knew until now how much.’
‘You were not useless,’ she said hotly. ‘I would be dead if it were not for you. And how could I tell you?’
‘I would have married you the moment we reached Gibraltar, Hebe, you know that.’
‘Yes, and jilted Lady Clarissa? Caused a scandal? Forced me into a loveless marriage?’
She looked up and saw him staring at her, his handsome face frozen into an expressionless mask. What was going on behind those blue eyes?
‘And when you did find a man who proposed a love match to you—always supposing, after what I had done, you could bring yourself to contemplate marriage—what would you do then?’ He sounded as though he was interrogating a prisoner. If Hebe had not known him so well, loved him so deeply, she would have been frightened of him. As it was, she could hear the pain behind the harsh words.
‘I realised I could never marry,’ she said calmly. ‘I will not marry without love. I could not deceive a man whom I did love, and I cannot expect any man to accept with complaisance such a history.’
